*$%# Maps !!!!!
We’re just back from The Netherlands and Belgium, with short day trips to France and Germany. Nice trip, good times and some very interesting caches along the route. One big freekin’ problem, our GPS maps would not work, at all. We had coords to caches but no road maps to get to them. After investing $100.00 in maps, this was discouraging to say the least.
Belgium is crisscrossed with little, narrow, twisty roads, some we thought were just driveways. Caches that appear just a few 100 feet away take an hour to drive to, in and out, up and down and than backtrack. Maps would have been very helpful. We did find a paper road map, but it was larger than the whole car and the driver was not that fond of it being flapped in his face.
The virtual caches at places like the Vimy Memorial are experiences I will never forget. Caching along the ramparts in Ieper is awesome, doing the hike on Hill 65 makes history come alive. I can honestly say this was the vacation where we learned the most. We both have a new appreciation of WW1 and what all those thousands of young men lived and died through.
Nov 11 comes with a new respect. Soldiers past and present have a new respect. Our peaceful existence has a new respect.
Caching took us to places we would never have experienced, made us actually see history. Maps would just have made it easier to do more, but then again, this is a real case of quality over quantity. Maybe we didn’t need the maps at all.
Seasoned Geocachers like yourselves don’t need any stinkin maps. I would love to do the many historic area caches in Europe.
We ran in the same problem when we were down in Panama two years ago. And the map we could put our hands on almost looked like something a 10 year old drew. It was very frustrating. Still ended up finding some but we did a lot of milage for nothing.
That is too bad.
We got good maps for europe for the Oregon and the Legend when we went to UK. They were really helpful when looking for caches in villages with winding streets. They also helped on a few occasions when lookng for our hotel at the end of a long day of hiking.
We are still arranging to pay for ours.
Map kerfuffle aside, it sounds like you had an incredible experience and got a bit more out of your vacation than expected. It’s wonderful how caching takes us to places that we might not normally get to see and even more amazing how it can change your life, in all sorts of ways.
LOL, sorryto hear you had map troubles. I wonder however if it was a naming convention that was the problem. I know someone who had that problem also, map worked on the Oregon but not on the Legend HCx. For the Legend HCx, the map file name had to be “gmapsupp.img” to work.
knew we shoulda stuck with the styk 🙂
ahh, shucks…..
I’ve never had maps on my GPS. so this probably wouldn’t be a problem for me. I usually Google Map the area I’m headed to, and Memorize the important details. =)
I am very jealous of your visit to Vimy. Someday, I will do the same.